America has three living winners of the Nobel Peace
Prize, two
universally renowned and the other so little celebrated that not one
person in a hundred would be likely to pick his face out of a police lineup, or
even recognize his name. The universally known recipients are Elie Wiesel, who
for leading an exemplary life has been justly rewarded with honor and acclaim,
and Henry Kissinger, who in the aftermath of his Nobel has realized wealth and
prestige. America's third peace-prize winner, in contrast, has been the subject
of little public notice, and has passed up every opportunity to parley his
award into riches or personal distinction. And the third winner's
accomplishments, unlike Kissinger's, are morally unambiguous. Though barely
known in the country of his birth, elsewhere in the world Norman Borlaug is
widely considered to be among the leading Americans of our age.

Borlaug is an eighty-two-year-old plant breeder who for most of the past five
decades has lived in developing nations, teaching the techniques of high-yield
agriculture. He received the Nobel in 1970,
primarily for his work in reversing
the food shortages that haunted India and Pakistan in the 1960s. Perhaps more
than anyone else, Borlaug is responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded
faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were
widely predicted—for example, in the 1967 best seller Famine—1975! The form
of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion
deaths.

Yet although he has led one of the century's most accomplished lives, and done
so in a meritorious cause, Borlaug has never received much public recognition
in the United States, where it is often said that the young lack heroes to look
up to. One reason is that Borlaug's deeds are done in nations remote from the
media spotlight: the Western press covers tragedy and strife in poor countries,
but has little to say about progress there. Another reason is that Borlaug's
mission—to cause the environment to produce significantly more food—has come
to be seen, at least by some securely affluent commentators, as perhaps better
left undone. More food sustains human population growth, which they see as
antithetical to the natural world.

The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the World Bank, once sponsors of his
work, have recently given Borlaug the cold shoulder. Funding institutions have
also cut support for the International Maize and Wheat Center—located in
Mexico and known by its Spanish acronym, CIMMYT
—where Borlaug helped to
develop the high-yield, low-pesticide dwarf wheat upon which a substantial
portion of the world's population now depends for sustenance. And though
Borlaug's achievements are arguably the greatest that Ford or Rockefeller has
ever funded, both foundations have retreated from the last effort of Borlaug's
long life: the attempt to bring high-yield agriculture to Africa.

The African continent is the main place where food production has not kept
pace with population growth: its potential for a Malthusian catastrophe is
great. Borlaug's initial efforts in a few African nations have yielded the
same rapid increases in food production as did his initial efforts on the
Indian subcontinent in the 1960s. Nevertheless, Western environmental
groups have campaigned against introducing high-yield farming techniques to
Africa, and have persuaded image-sensitive organizations such as the Ford
Foundation and the World Bank to steer clear of Borlaug. So far the only
prominent support for Borlaug's Africa project has come from former President
Jimmy Carter, a humanist and himself a farmer, and from the late
mediagenic multimillionaire Japanese industrialist Ryoichi Sasakawa.

Reflecting Western priorities, the debate about whether high-yield agriculture
would be good for Africa is currently phrased mostly in environmental terms,
not in terms of saving lives. By producing more food from less land, Borlaug
argues, high-yield farming will preserve Africa's wild habitats, which are now
being depleted by slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture. Opponents argue that
inorganic fertilizers and controlled irrigation will bring a new environmental
stress to the one continent where the chemical-based approach to food
production has yet to catch on. In this debate the moral imperative of food for
the world's malnourished—whether they "should" have been born or not, they
must eat—stands in danger of being forgotten.

The Lesson of the Dust Bowl

Norman Borlaug was born in Cresco, Iowa, in 1914. Ideas being
tested in Iowa
around the time of his boyhood would soon transform the American Midwest into
"the world's breadbasket," not only annually increasing total production—so
methodically that the increases were soon taken for granted—but annually
improving yield, growing more bushels of grain from the same amount of land or
less. From about 1950 until the 1980s midwestern farmers improved yields by
around three percent a year, more than doubling the overall yield through the
period. This feat of expansion was so spectacular that some pessimists declared
it was a special case that could never be repeated. But it has been done again,
since around 1970, in China.

Entering college as the Depression began, Borlaug worked for a time in the
Northeastern Forestry Service, often with men from the Civilian Conservation
Corps, occasionally dropping out of school to earn money to finish his degree
in forest management. He passed the civil-service exam and was accepted into
the Forest Service, but the job fell through. He then began to pursue a
graduate degree in plant pathology. During his studies he did a research
project on the movement of spores of rust, a class of fungus that plagues many
crops. The project, undertaken when the existence of the jet stream was not yet
known, established that rust-spore clouds move internationally in sync with
harvest cycles—a surprising finding at the time. The process opened
Borlaug's
eyes to the magnitude of the world beyond Iowa's borders.

At the same time, the Midwest was becoming the Dust Bowl. Though some mythology
now attributes the Dust Bowl to a conversion to technological farming methods,
in Borlaug's mind the problem was the lack of such methods. Since then American
farming has become far more technological, and no Dust Bowl conditions have
recurred. In the summer of 1988 the Dakotas had a drought as bad as
that in the
Dust Bowl, but clouds of soil were rare because few crops failed. Borlaug was
horrified by the Dust Bowl and simultaneously impressed that its effects seemed
least where high-yield approaches to farming were being tried. He decided that
his life's work would be to spread the benefits of high-yield farming to the
many nations where crop failures as awful as those in the Dust Bowl were
regular facts of life.

In 1943 the Rockefeller Foundation established the precursor to CIMMYT to
assist the poor farmers of Mexico, doing so at the behest of the former
Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, of the Pioneer Hi-Bred seed company
family, who had been unable to extract any money from Congress for agricultural
aid to Mexico. Soon Borlaug was in Mexico as the director of the wheat
program—a job for which there was little competition, backwater Mexico
in the
1940s not being an eagerly sought-after posting. Except for brief intervals, he
has lived in the developing world since.

The program's initial goal was to teach Mexican farmers new farming ideas, but
Borlaug soon had the institution seeking agricultural innovations. One was
"shuttle breeding," a technique for speeding up the movement of disease
immunity between strains of crops. Borlaug also developed cereals that were
insensitive to the number of hours of light in a day, and could therefore be
grown in many climates.

Borlaug's leading research achievement was to hasten the perfection of dwarf
spring wheat. Though it is conventionally assumed that farmers want a tall,
impressive-looking harvest, in fact shrinking wheat and other crops has often
proved beneficial. Bred for short stalks, plants expend less energy on growing
inedible column sections and more on growing valuable grain. Stout,
short-stalked wheat also neatly supports its kernels, whereas tall-stalked
wheat may bend over at maturity, complicating reaping. Nature has favored genes
for tall stalks, because in nature plants must compete for access to sunlight.
In high-yield agriculture equally short-stalked plants will receive equal
sunlight. As Borlaug labored to perfect his wheat, researchers were seeking
dwarf strains of rice at the International Rice Research Institute, in the
Philippines, another of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations' creations, and at
China's Hunan Rice Research Institute.

Once the Rockefeller's Mexican program was producing high-yield dwarf wheat for
Mexico, Borlaug began to argue that India and other nations should switch to
cereal crops. The proposition was controversial then and remains so today, some
environmental commentators asserting that farmers in the developing world
should grow indigenous crops (lentils in India, cassava in Africa) rather than
the grains favored in the West. Borlaug's argument was simply that since no one
had yet perfected high-yield strains of indigenous plants (high-yield cassava
has only recently been available), CIMMYT wheat would produce the most food
calories for the developing world. Borlaug particularly favored wheat because
it grows in nearly all environments and requires relatively little pesticide,
having an innate resistance to insects.

CIMMYT's selectively bred wheat, no longer a wholly natural plant, would not
prosper without fertilizer and irrigation, however. High-yield crops sprout
with great enthusiasm, but the better plants grow, the more moisture they
demand and the faster they deplete soil nutrients. Like most agronomists,
Borlaug has always advocated using organic fertilizers—usually manure—to
restore soil nutrients. But the way to attain large quantities of manure is to
have large herds of livestock, busily consuming the grain that would otherwise
feed people. Inorganic fertilizers based on petroleum and other minerals can
renew soil on a global scale—at least as long as the petroleum holds
out.

The Green Revolution

To Borlaug, the argument for high-yield cereal crops,
inorganic fertilizers,
and irrigation became irrefutable when the global population began to take off
after the Second World War. But many governments of developing nations were
suspicious, partly for reasons of tradition (wheat was then a foreign substance
in India) and partly because contact between Western technical experts and
peasant farmers might shake up feudal cultures to the discomfort of the elite
classes. Meanwhile, some commentators were suggesting that it would be wrong to
increase the food supply in the developing world: better to let nature do the
dirty work of restraining the human population.

Yet statistics suggest that high-yield agriculture brakes population growth
rather than accelerating it, by starting the progression from the
high-birth-rate, high-death-rate societies of feudal cultures toward the
low-birth-rate, low-death-rate societies of Western nations. As the former
Indian diplomat Karan Singh is reported to have said, "Development is the best
contraceptive." In subsistence agriculture children are viewed as manual labor,
and thus large numbers are desired. In technical agriculture knowledge becomes
more important, and parents thus have fewer children in order to devote
resources to their education.

In 1963 the Rockefeller Foundation and the government of Mexico established
CIMMYT, as an outgrowth of their original program, and sent Borlaug to Pakistan
and India, which were then descending into famine. He failed in his initial
efforts to persuade the parastatal seed and grain monopolies that those
countries had established after independence to switch to high-yield crop
strains.

Despite the institutional resistance Borlaug stayed in Pakistan and India,
tirelessly repeating himself. By 1965 famine on the subcontinent was so bad
that governments made a commitment to dwarf wheat. Borlaug arranged for a
convoy of thirty-five trucks to carry high-yield seeds from CIMMYT to a Los
Angeles dock for shipment. The convoy was held up by the Mexican police,
blocked by U.S. border agents attempting to enforce a ban on seed importation,
and then stopped by the National Guard when the Watts riot prevented access to
the L.A. harbor. Finally the seed ship sailed. Borlaug says, "I went to bed
thinking the problem was at last solved, and woke up to the news that war had
broken out between India and Pakistan."

Nevertheless, Borlaug and many local scientists who were his former trainees in
Mexico planted the first crop of dwarf wheat on the subcontinent, sometimes
working within sight of artillery flashes. Sowed late, that crop germinated
poorly, yet yields still rose 70 percent. This prevented general wartime
starvation in the region, though famine did strike parts of India. There were
also riots in the state of Kerala in 1966, when a population whose ancestors
had for centuries eaten rice was presented with sacks of wheat flour
originating in Borlaug's fields.

Owing to wartime emergency, Borlaug was given the go-ahead to circumvent the
parastatals. "Within a few hours of that decision I had all the seed contracts
signed and a much larger planting effort in place," he says. "If it hadn't been
for the war, I might never have been given true freedom to test these ideas."
The next harvest "was beautiful, a 98 percent improvement." By 1968 Pakistan
was self-sufficient in wheat production. India required only a few years
longer. Paul Ehrlich had written in
The Population Bomb (1968) that it was "a
fantasy" that India would "ever" feed itself. By 1974 India was self-sufficient
in the production of all cereals. Pakistan progressed from harvesting 3.4
million tons of wheat annually when Borlaug arrived to around 18 million today,
India from 11 million tons to 60 million. In both nations food production since
the 1960s has increased faster than the rate of population growth. Briefly in
the mid-1980s India even entered the world export market for grains.

Borlaug's majestic accomplishment came to be labeled the Green Revolution.
Whether it was really a revolution is open to debate. As Robert Kates, a former
director of the World Hunger Program, at Brown University, says, "If you plot
growth in farm yields over the century, the 1960s period does not particularly
stand out for overall global trends. What does stand out is the movement of
yield increases from the West to the developing world, and Borlaug was one of
the crucial innovators there." Touring the subcontinent in the late 1960s and
encountering field after field of robust wheat, Forrest Frank Hill, a former
vice-president of the Ford Foundation, told Borlaug, "Enjoy this now, because
nothing like it will ever happen to you again. Eventually the naysayers and the
bureaucrats will choke you to death, and you won't be able to get permission
for more of these efforts."

The High-Yield Boom

For some time this augury seemed mistaken, as Borlaug's view
of agriculture
remained ascendant. In 1950 the world produced 692 million tons of grain for
2.2 billion people; by 1992 production was 1.9 billion tons for 5.6 billion
people—2.8 times the grain for 2.2 times the population. Global grain yields
rose from 0.45 tons per acre to 1.1 tons; yields of corn, rice, and other
foodstuffs improved similarly. From 1965 to 1990 the globe's daily per capita
intake grew from 2,063 calories to 2,495, with an increased proportion as
protein. Malnutrition continued as a problem of global scale but decreased in
percentage terms, even as more than two billion people were added to the
population.

The world's 1950 grain output of 692 million tons came from 1.7 billion acres
of cropland, the 1992 output of 1.9 billion tons from 1.73 billion acres --
a 170
percent increase from one percent more land. "Without high-yield agriculture,"
Borlaug says, "either millions would have starved or increases in food output
would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under
cultivation—losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than all
losses to
urban and suburban expansion."

The trend toward harvesting more from fewer acres, often spun in the media as a
shocking crisis of "vanishing farms," is perhaps the most environmentally
favorable development of the modern age. Paul Waggoner, of the Connecticut
Agricultural Experiment Station, says, "From long before Malthus until about
forty-five years ago each person took more land from nature than his parents
did. For the past forty-five years people have been taking less land from
nature than their parents."

In developing nations where population growth is surging, high-yield
agriculture holds back the rampant deforestation of wild areas. Waggoner
calculates that India's transition to high-yield farming spared the country
from having to plough an additional 100 million acres of virgin land—an area
about equivalent to California. In the past five years India has been able to
slow and perhaps even halt its national deforestation, a hopeful sign. This
would have been impossible were India still feeding itself with traditionally
cultivated indigenous crops.

Backlash

Nonetheless, by the 1980s finding fault with high-yield
agriculture had become
fashionable. Environmentalists began to tell the Ford and Rockefeller
Foundations and Western governments that high-yield techniques would despoil
the developing world. As Borlaug turned his attention to high-yield projects
for Africa, where mass starvation still seemed a plausible threat, some green
organizations became determined to stop him there. "The environmental community
in the 1980s went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundations
not to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa," says David
Seckler, the director of the International Irrigation Management
Institute.

Environmental lobbyists persuaded the Ford Foundation and the World Bank to
back off from most African agriculture projects. The Rockefeller Foundation
largely backed away too—though it might have in any case, because it was
shifting toward an emphasis on biotechnological agricultural research. "World
Bank fear of green political pressure in Washington became the single biggest
obstacle to feeding Africa," Borlaug says. The green parties of Western Europe
persuaded most of their governments to stop supplying fertilizer to Africa; an
exception was Norway, which has a large crown corporation that makes fertilizer
and avidly promotes its use. Borlaug, once an honored presence at the Ford and
Rockefeller Foundations, became, he says, "a tar baby to them politically,
because all the ideas the greenies couldn't stand were sticking to me."

Borlaug's reaction to the campaign was anger. He says, "Some of the
environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but
many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of
hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or
Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world,
as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and
irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were
trying to deny them these things."

In 1984, at the age of seventy-one, Borlaug was drawn out of retirement by
Ryoichi Sasakawa, who with Jimmy Carter was working to get African agriculture
moving. Carter was campaigning in favor of fertilizer aid to Africa, as he
still does today. The former President had fallen in with Sasakawa, who during
the Second World War had founded the National Essence Mass Party, a Japanese
fascist group, but who in later life developed a conscience. Today the Sasakawa
Peace Foundation is a leading supporter of disarmament initiatives;
Carter and
Sasakawa often made joint appearances for worthy causes.

Sasakawa called Borlaug, who related his inability to obtain World Bank or
foundation help for high-yield-agriculture initiatives in Africa. Sasakawa was
dumbfounded that a Nobel Peace Prize winner couldn't get backing for a
philanthropic endeavor. He offered to fund Borlaug in Africa for five years.
Borlaug said, "I'm seventy-one. I'm too old to start again." Sasakawa replied,
"I'm fifteen years older than you, so I guess we should have started
yesterday." Borlaug, Carter, and Sasakawa traveled to Africa to pick sites, and
the foundation Sasakawa-Global 2000 was born. "I assumed we'd do a few years of
research first," Borlaug says, "but after I saw the terrible circumstances
there, I said, 'Let's just start growing.'" Soon Borlaug was running projects
in Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania, and Togo. Yields of corn
quickly tripled; yields of wheat, cassava, sorghum, and cow peas also grew.

Borlaug made progress even in Sudan, near the dry Sahel, though that project
ended with the onset of Sudan's civil war, in 1992. Only Sasakawa's foundation
came forward with more funds, but although well endowed, it is no World Bank.
Environmentalists continued to say that chemical fertilizers would cause an
ecological calamity in Africa.

Opponents of high-yield agriculture "took the numbers for water pollution
caused by fertilizer runoff in the United States and applied them to Africa,
which is totally fallacious," David Seckler says. "Chemical-fertilizer use in
Africa is so tiny you could increase application for decades before causing the
environmental side effects we see here. Meanwhile, Africa is ruining its
wildlife habitat with slash-and-burn farming, which many commentators
romanticize because it is indigenous." Borlaug found that some foundation
managers and World Bank officials had become hopelessly confused regarding the
distinction between pesticides and fertilizer. He says, "The opponents of
high-yield for Africa were speaking of the two as if they were the same because
they're both made from chemicals, when the scales of toxicity are vastly
different. Fertilizer only replaces substances naturally present in the soils
anyway."

In Africa and throughout the developing world Borlaug and most other
agronomists now teach forms of "integrated pest management," which reduces
pesticide use because chemicals are sprayed at the most vulnerable point in an
insect's life cycle. Borlaug says, "All serious agronomists know that
pesticides must be kept to a minimum, and besides, pesticides are expensive.
But somehow the media believe the overspraying is still going on, and this
creates a bias against high-yield agriculture." Indonesia has for nearly a
decade improved rice yields while reducing pesticide use by employing
integrated pest management. The use of pesticides has been in decline relative
to farm production for more than a decade in the United States, where the use
of fertilizer, too, has started declining relative to production.

Such developments have begun to sway some of Borlaug's opposition. The
Committee on Sustainable Agriculture, a coalition of environmental and
development-oriented groups, has become somewhat open to fertilizer use in
Africa. "The environmental movement went through a phase of revulsion against
any chemical use in agriculture," says Robert Blake, the committee's chairman.
"People are coming to realize that is just not realistic. Norman has been right
about this all along." One reason the ground is shifting back in his direction,
Borlaug believes, is that the green parties of Europe have been frightened by
the sudden wave of migrants entering their traditionally low-immigration
nations, and now think that improving conditions in Africa isn't such a bad
idea after all.

Supposing that opposition to high-yield agriculture for Africa declines, the
question becomes What can be accomplished there? Pierre Crosson, an
agricultural analyst for the nonpartisan think tank
Resources for the Future,
calculates that sub-Saharan Africa needs to increase farm yields by 3.3 percent
annually for the next thirty years merely to keep pace with the population
growth that is projected. This means that Africa must do what the American
Midwest did.

"Africa has the lowest farm yields in the world and also a large amount of
undeveloped land, so in theory a huge increase in food production could
happen," says John Bongaarts, the research director of the Population Council,
a nonprofit international research organization. "If southern Sudan was parked
in the Midwest, they'd be growing stuff like crazy there now." Practical
problems, however, make Bongaarts think that rapid African yield increases are
"extremely unlikely in the near future." The obvious obstacles are desperate
poverty and lack of social cohesion. When Borlaug transformed the agriculture
of Pakistan and India, those nations had many problems but also reasonably well
organized economies, good road and rail systems, irrigation projects under way,
and an established entrepreneurial ethos. Much of Africa lacks these.

Additionally, African countries often lack a social focus on increasing
agricultural output. Young men, especially, consider the farm a backwater from
which they long to escape to the city. African governments and technical
ministries tend to look down on food production as an old-fashioned economic
sector, longing instead for high-tech facilities that suggest Western prestige
and power. Yet a basic reason that the United States and the European Union
nations are so strong is that they have achieved almost total mastery over
agriculture, producing ample food at ever-lower prices.

An encouraging example of an African government taking a progressive view of
agriculture comes from Ethiopia, where, since the end of its civil war, Borlaug
has run his most successful African project. Visiting Ethiopia in 1994, Jimmy
Carter took Prime Minister Meles Zenawi on a tour of places where Borlaug's
ideas could be tested, and won Zenawi's support for an extension-service
campaign to aid farmers. During the 1995-1996 season Ethiopia recorded the
greatest harvests of major crops in its history, with a 32 percent increase in
production and a 15 percent increase in average yield over the previous season.
Use of the fertilizer diammonium phosphate was the key reform. The rapid yield
growth suggests that other sub-Saharan countries may also have hope for
increased food production.

Whether Africa can increase its food production may soon become one of the
questions of international affairs. It may be one at which, in a decade or two,
Western governments will frantically throw money after a crisis hits, whereas
more-moderate investments begun now might avert the day of reckoning. And one
of the questions of the next century may be whether the world can feed itself
at all.

10 Billion Mouths

His opponents may not know it, but Borlaug has long warned of
the dangers of
population growth. "In my Nobel lecture," Borlaug says, "I suggested we had
until the year 2000 to tame the population monster, and then food shortages
would take us under. Now I believe we have a little longer. The Green
Revolution can make Africa productive. The breakup of the former Soviet Union
has caused its grain output to plummet, but if the new republics recover
economically, they could produce vast amounts of food. More fertilizer can make
the favored lands of Latin America—especially Argentina and Brazil—more
productive. The cerrado region of Brazil, a very large area long assumed to be
infertile because of toxic soluble aluminum in the soil, may become a
breadbasket, because aluminum-resistant crop strains are being developed." This
last is an example of agricultural advances and environmental protection going
hand in hand: in the past decade the deforestation rate in the Amazon rain
forest has declined somewhat, partly because the cerrado now looks more
attractive.

Borlaug continues, "But Africa, the former Soviet republics, and the cerrado
are the last frontiers. After they are in use, the world will have no
additional sizable blocks of arable land left to put into production, unless
you are willing to level whole forests, which you should not do. So future
food-production increases will have to come from higher yields. And though I
have no doubt yields will keep going up, whether they can go up enough to feed
the population monster is another matter. Unless progress with agricultural
yields remains very strong, the next century will experience sheer human misery
that, on a numerical scale, will exceed the worst of everything that has come
before."

But "very strong" progress on yields seems problematic. John Bongaarts
calculates that agricultural yields outside Western countries must double in
the coming century merely to maintain current—and inadequate—nutrition
levels. The United Nations projects that human numbers will reach about 9.8
billion, from about 5.8 billion today, around the year 2050. To bring the
entire world's diet in that year to a level comparable to that of the West,
Bongaarts calculates, would require a 430 percent increase in food
production.

Lester Brown, the head of the Worldwatch
Institute, an environmental
organization, fears that China may soon turn from an agricultural success story
into a nation of shortages. Because much of it is mountainous, China already
uses most of its attractive tillage area, leaving scant room for expansion. Its
remarkable improvements in wheat and rice yields have come in part, Brown
thinks, at the expense of depleting the national water table: irrigation water
may soon become scarce. As newly affluent Chinese consumers demand more chicken
and beef, feeding increased amounts of grain to animals may cause grain
scarcity. If, as some experts project, the Chinese population rises from 1.2
billion to 1.6 billion, yield increases will not bridge the difference, Brown
fears.

Privatization and dwarf rice have enabled China to raise rice yields rapidly to
about 1.6 tons per acre—close to the world's best figure of two tons. But
recently rice-yield increases have flattened. The International Rice Research
Institute is working on a new strain that may boost yields dramatically, but
whether it will prosper in the field is unknown. Ismail Serageldin, the
chairman of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, in
Washington, D.C., believes that the "biological maximum" for rice yield is
about seven tons per acre—four times today's average in developing
countries,
but perhaps a line that cannot be crossed.

An important unknown is whether genetic engineering will improve agricultural
yields. Corn is among the highest-yielding plants. "If the high natural
multiples of maize could be transferred by gene engineering to wheat or rice,
there could be a tremendous world yield improvement," Paul Waggoner, of the
Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, says. So far genetic engineering
has not produced any higher-yielding strains, though it does show promise for
reducing pesticide application. Some researchers also think that biotechnology
will be able to pack more protein and minerals into cereal grains. Others,
Borlaug among them, are skeptical about whether yield itself can be engineered.
So far gene recombination can move only single genes or small contiguous gene
units. Borlaug says, "Unless there is one master gene for yield, which I'm
guessing there is not, engineering for yield will be very complex. It may
happen eventually, but through the coming decades we must assume that gene
engineering will not be the answer to the world's food problems."

Today Borlaug divides his time among CIMMYT, where he teaches young scientists
seeking still-more-productive crop strains for the developing world; Texas
A&M, where he teaches international agriculture every fall semester; and
the Sasakawa-Global 2000 projects that continue to operate in twelve African
nations.

Borlaug's Africa project is a private-sector effort run by an obscure Nobel
Peace Prize winner and a former American President whose altruistic impulses
are made sport of in the American press. Its goal is something the West seems
almost to have given up on—the rescue of Africa from human suffering.
Recently
Western governments have been easing out of African aid, pleading "donor
fatigue," the difficulty of overcoming corruption, and fear of criticism from
the environmental lobby. Private organizations, including Borlaug's,
Catholic Relief Services, and Oxfam,
carry on what's left of the fight.

If overpopulation anarchy comes, it is likely to arrive first in Africa.
Borlaug understands this, and is using his remaining years to work against that
cataclysm. The odds against him seem long. But then, Norman Borlaug has already
saved more lives than any other person who ever lived.